Home recording set up with mac - need help

[cheer tunes]

KevWind: why do you like the SSD drive on the iMac? Would the 512 GB option suffice for a hobbyist?

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by cheer tunes

KevWind: why do you like the SSD drive on the iMac? Would the 512 GB option suffice for a hobbyist?

If you are not storing big video and or photo files or hugh sample libraries a 512 GB should work pretty well
On my Macbook Air I have the 512 GB SSD ... I have about 208 GB used in applications and 289 available
I tend to like the latest fastest tech and so again if it were me, I would opt for the i7 and 512 SSD

PCIe SSD drives are the fastest Drive tech available today in common usege . And theoretically it will outlast a mechanical spinning HDD . Also with the USB 3 and thunderbolt connections on the iMac , if you ever filled up the 512 you can get outboard SSD storage .

The fusion drive may be fine I have never worked on one, but be aware that as long as you using the SSD portion (24 GB on a 1TB fusion drive ) is will be fast but if you get into a situation where it is having to send data back and forth between the SSD and HDD, it is my understanding that the HDD is a 5200 drive so it will likely be slow by comparison .

[DupleMeter]

Regardless of whether you go Fusion Drive or SSD you should not record to your boot drive. Pick up an external drive for recording. The boot drive is pretty busy during normal computer operations (reading/writing caches & virtual memory swap files).

As I said before GarageBand is a no-go for you if you want to send out .wav files for mixing. It only supports .m4a files. If you don't care that your files are .m4a then it doesn't matter. If it's just a hobby thing it might not make enough of a difference to warrant the extra expenditure.

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by DupleMeter

Regardless of whether you go Fusion Drive or SSD you should not record to your boot drive. Pick up an external drive for recording. The boot drive is pretty busy during normal computer operations (reading/writing caches & virtual memory swap files).

I think that while that certainly was true in the past as being "best practice" Particularly for those who have come up using Pro tools
With with the improvements in size of boot drives and the improvements in Processor ,Bus an RAM speeds, it is becoming much less so and is probably not really an issue any more, in sessions with small track counts and few if any virtual instruments. Certainly not something I would be concerned about as a home hobby recordist at least to get started.

[cheer tunes]

Duplemeter, when i got my orig rig 7 or 8 years ago (mac book pro, logic express, apogee duet) i also took the advice of a sweetwater rep and got external drive to record to. I got a glyph drive that connected via fire wire. It worked ok but i started noticing some latency when doing basic tracking. At some point i started recording directly to the hard drive of the mac book and that was fine. Most of my projects were 3-5 tracks with minimal processing. My plan going forward is to just get the levels right and record dry /clean tracks so that I can send the wavs for processing. That is a whole discipline that I don't have time to master and will let some of the post prod shops work on.